As a writer who predominately learned the craft through the careful study of authorial techniques in stories I’ve read, it grows progressively difficult to read (or otherwise consume) narratives, as the majority use only a small handful of techniques so that, within the first five pages or five minutes, you already know exactly where the [...]
About six years ago I had a dream that I would write a novel called Staring at the Sun from Underwater, about a young man trying to escape from the horror and routines of everyday life who begins having vivid and seemingly prophetic dreams, and then gets stuck in his dreams and must struggle his [...]
The past few months I’ve been immersed in the canonical Library America edition of the collected works of Philip K Dick, consecutively reading The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Ubik, Martian Time-Slip, Dr. Bloodmoney, Now Wait for Last Year, and Flow My Tears, [...]
I was already familiar with a number of the world’s mythologies before I first read Gaiman’s Sandman comics as a kid, but the thing Gaiman managed to do was make the characters from myth living and real, still active forces at work in our contemporary skeptical world. In American Gods, he takes this to the [...]
Now that the semester’s over and I have more time to read, I’m attempting to keep up on writing reviews of all the interesting fiction that crosses my path. As a writer, I try to focus on issues of technique, influence, and the relation of form to content, that you don’t typically find in the [...]
The Bunker Flash fiction by Tait McKenzie Johnson Robert Lambkin had survived the end of the world, at least the last time it was supposed to go kaput, he told me as we stood on the beach, watching the sun try to rise. You see, it was the ‘80s, and for an old hippy like [...]
The Hierophany Flash Fiction by Tait McKenzie Johnson Friedrich Carter was nearing retirement and he still hadn’t met a god. Not that he ever spoke of it, not in lectures or in private, he was far too serious to say such things out loud, but I could tell by the tone of his voice, the [...]
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
As a counterpoint to my earlier post’s suggestion that authors can mythically enter into the stories they tell , I thought it necessary to point out that a similar thing happens during the act of reading a story, that in fact reading is, by the nature of the imagination, always participatory. This point is probably [...]
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
The other day for the final in my Lectures in Literature class on adaptation, I wrote an essay that managed to articulate ways in which myths can be lived by the people who tell them. As opposed to someone like Milton, who uses mythological themes and characters in an old way, that is, as historical [...]
In the 1940s, when Alejandro Carpentier developed his concept of Marvelous Realism, it was in response to the European Surrealists, who he saw as trying to hold onto an Old World magic that was rapidly vanishing into the logic of modernity. The New World, however, Carpentier felt, was still a fertlie ground for the exploration [...]
